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Enabling user-dump in Windows

June 1, 2010 — blogsai

It is hard to believe how complex enabling user-dump can get in Windows !! And there are different procedures on every different version of Windows ! I don’t understand Windows internals that well. But I wonder what makes it that difficult to keep it consistent across their own OS kernels. Gives one more reason (as a developer) to not like Windows. And there are different tools, procedures, scattered knowledge base articles to illustrate the steps.

1. Using a tool named userdump and this can be used to generate user dump on the following Windows OSes –

2. Now this is different for Windows Vista and Windows 7 and for these OS flavors, you open task manager, right-click on the process and click on “Create dump file” option. And if you have process that hangs or crashes you can use Adplus tool. The same procedure is applicable to all sorts of Windows 2008 editions

Adplus is a vbscript a utility written around CDB. This can run in two modes –

a. Hang mode – to detect process hangs and create user dump

b. Crash mode – to detect process crashes and create user dump

For example to create a user dump using adplus run the following command –

5. Now what about production systems where you wouldn’t want to install any such tools but still want to get a user-dump file. This is still a question to me and am looking for an answer. So if any of you windows gurus are here do tell me how ?